Report Slams Administration for Underestimating Gulf Spill

A cleanup worker on June 4, picking up an absorbent snare filled with oil on Queen Bess Island in Jefferson Parish, La.Credit
Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration failed to act upon or fully inform the public of its own worst-case estimates of the amount of oil gushing from the blown-out BP well, slowing response efforts and keeping the American people in the dark for weeks about the size of the disaster, according to preliminary reports from the presidential commission investigating the accident.

The government repeatedly underestimated how much oil was flowing into the Gulf of Mexico and how much was left after the well was capped in July, leading to a loss of faith in the government’s ability to handle the spill and a continuing breach between the federal authorities and state and local officials, the commission staff members found in a series of four reports issued Wednesday.

“By initially underestimating the amount of oil flow and then, at the end of the summer, appearing to underestimate the amount of oil remaining in the gulf,” one of the reports stated, “the federal government created the impression that it was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem.”

The reports also say that about two weeks after the BP rig exploded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked the White House for permission to make public its worst-case models for the accident. The White House Office of Management and Budget initially denied the request, according to government officials interviewed by the commission’s staff members.

The White House responded vigorously to the assertions on Wednesday, saying it never concealed its most dire estimates of the spill and quickly threw everything the government had at the problem. As for the NOAA report, White House officials said that it was a flawed and incomplete study and that they sent it back to the agency for more analysis. It was eventually released in early July.

The four reports, from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, make clear that the president-appointed panel does not intend to spare the administration as it prepares a final report on the accident to be delivered to the White House early next year.

It has not yet completed its work on the causes of the well explosion or the efforts to contain the oil, but the tenor of Wednesday’s reports indicates that the White House, cabinet officers, Coast Guard commanders and senior government scientists will shoulder a fair amount of blame for the response to the accident.

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The government stuck to its public flow rate estimate of 5,000 barrels a day for more than a month, even though BP officials and government scientists acknowledged that the rate could be as high as 110,000 barrels a day.

Ultimately, government and independent scientists established that the uncontrolled flow was roughly 60,000 barrels a day for much of the spill, discharging nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf. The 18,000-foot-deep well was capped on July 15 and declared dead in late September, when a cement plug was fixed to the bottom.

Government officials have acknowledged that they miscalculated the amount of oil pouring into the gulf and, at least early on, relied on data from BP. But they said they based their response not on those figures but on worst-case estimates, including the figure of 162,000 barrels a day that BP used in its 2009 drilling permit application.

The government deployed thousands of vessels to try to collect and contain the oil and used nearly two million gallons of dispersants to break it into small droplets to speed its degradation.

In August, top administration officials said that 75 percent of the oil had evaporated, dissolved or been collected, implying that their efforts had been largely successful and that ecological damage had been limited. Carol Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change, declared on Aug. 4: “I think it’s also important to note that our scientists have done an initial assessment and more than three-quarters of the oil is gone. The vast majority of the oil is gone.”

But the commission staff members said the government’s own data did not support such sweeping conclusions, which were later scaled back. A number of respected independent researchers have concluded that as much as half of the spilled oil remains suspended in the water or buried on the seafloor and in coastal sludge. And it will be some time before scientists can paint an accurate picture of the ecological damage.

Correction: October 19, 2010

A picture caption on Oct. 7 with an article about preliminary reports from a presidential commission criticizing the Obama administration’s response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico misidentified the Louisiana parish in which Queen Bess Island is located. It is part of Jefferson Parish, not Plaquemines Parish.

A version of this article appears in print on October 7, 2010, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Reports Fault Administration on Spill. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe